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In Sight Reading, Daphne Kalotay shows mellifluous ability to write about music

Internecine spats, the failure of love, silly rivalries and the primordial urge to create art, are some of the human behaviours scrutinized with a fine eye in Daphne Kalotay’s novel Sight Reading, a fiction about the lives of classical musicians and their friends.

Kalotay’s writing is clear and evocative, allowing the reader to “hear” the music some of her characters are playing: Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, a Brahms violin sonata, a Bach preludeand other great works. At least, while reading, one feels compelled to listen to the DVD of whatever composition is under discussion.

Kalotay’s mellifluous ability to write about instrumental sound is reflected in the musings of Nicholas, a conductor and would-be composer. The piece he is currently working on, a Scottish-themed composition, is not quite finished, but Nicholas plans a Wagnerian sense of drama. “In the third movement things had darkened, a sense of something lurking underneath — a Loch Ness monster of sorts, Nicholas had come to think, something you may have seen or just imagined.”

The music draws the artists together and separates them, too, becoming emotional keys opening each other or barricades to the soul, especially when they don’t feel as talented as their colleagues.

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Nicholas is married to the comely Hazel and has a daughter. He meets violinist Remy and falls head over heels, putting aside Hazel, a woman he once described as his Grace Kelly.

Nicholas’s and Remy’s love begins to bloom during a concert. Remy begins to feel a warmth emanating from Nicholas. “At first she thought she might be imagining it, but the feeling continued throughout the second half of the performance, so that Remy’s heart began to pound, so certain she was that this warmth was real. Yes, she understood, finally what was different. It was that her own warmth was being reciprocated.”

The next move was, logically, bed. When Remy asks to accompany him home, “Nicholas frowned. And then, decisively, he gave a small nod.

“Only when they arrived at the apartment where she had been once before did Remy allow the thought of the smooth-haired wife to find its way into her mind. But the wife was far away, and Remy had spent so many years being good. When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.”

Luckily for Remy, when Nicholas does break off with Hazel, a magnificent if put-upon companion, Hazel works to keep relations civil.

In reality, all of Nicholas’s friendships are complicated, including one with a new pal, Israeli trumpeter Yoni. That relationship becomes atonal at one point, when Yoni says Remy’s heart should be treated with more care. A strange caution from a constant womanizer.

There are many perambulations in this story of musical friends, some heartbreaking, some endearing, some terribly disappointing. Kalotay infuses each of the characters with total believability stemming from her understanding of classical music and her perceptions of human nature.

She is a very wise writer, at least in her understanding of human behaviour, and her brilliant intuitions are augmented by her lyrical writing. She knows music and understands musicians, and that makes Sight Reading not only a gift to the harmonically challenged but to the rest of us, even if we haven’t picked up that clarinet since high school band.

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